eSpeak produces good quality English speech. It uses a different
synthesis method from other open source TTS engines, and sounds
quite different. It's perhaps not as natural or "smooth", but
the articulation is much clearer and easier to listen to for long
periods.

It can run as a command line program to speak text from a file
or from stdin. A shared library version is also available.

    * Includes different Voices, whose characteristics can be altered.
    * Can produce speech output as a WAV file.
    * SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is supported (not
      complete), and also HTML.
    * Compact size. The program and its data, including several
      languages, totals about 700 kbytes.
    * Can translate text to phoneme codes, so it could be adapted
      as a front end for another speech synthesis engine.
    * Potential for other languages. Several are included in varying
      stages of progress. Help from native speakers for these or
      other languages is welcomed.
    * Development tools available for producing and tuning phoneme data.
